Archive for the ‘Statism’ Category

I’m at the Capetown Airport, about to leave South Africa, so this is an opportune time to share some thoughts on what I learned in the past seven days.

1. Land Seizures – The number-one issue in the country is a plan by the government to impose Zimbabwe-style land confiscation. I already wrote about that issue, so I’ll cite today an editorial from the Wall Street Journal.

South Africa needs another enlightened leader like Nelson Mandela, but it keeps electing imitations of Robert Mugabe. President Cyril Ramaphosa confirmed recently that his government plans to expropriate private property without compensation, following the examples of Zimbabwe and Venezuela. …Supporters of expropriation claim black South Africans own less than 2% of rural land, and less than 7% of urban land… But the government’s 2017 land audit used questionable data… The Institute of Race Relations estimates black South Africans control 30% to 50% of the country’s land. …Mandela insisted that land reform is best achieved through a “willing buyer, willing seller” principle, as it is in other democracies with a strong rule of law. …snatching private property is about as destructive a policy as there is. The ANC was founded as a revolutionary party, and the tragedy is that it won’t let the revolution end.

To be sure, whites generally got the land illegitimately in the first place (something settlers also did to the Indians in America), so it’s not as if they are the angels in this conflict.

I’m simply saying that copying Zimbabwe-style policies would be catastrophically destructive to South Africa’s economy. Rich landowners obviously will be hurt, but poor black will be the biggest victims when the already-shaky economy goes under.

It’s unclear at this stage how far the government will push this policy. But since the nation already has suffered the biggest year-over-year decline in the International Property Rights Index, any additional steps in the wrong direction would be most unfortunate.

By the way, the news of property rights isn’t all bad. Here’s a video showing how poor people are getting titles to their homes.

2. Mandela’s Legacy – I remarked on my Facebook page that Nelson Mandela should be viewed as a great leader. I was one of many people who thought South Africa would descend into civil war between the races. Mandela deserves an immense amount of credit (along with unsung heroes in the South African community of classical liberals, such as Leon Louw of the Free Market Foundation) for ensuring the nation enjoyed a peaceful transition.

Did Mandela have some misguided views? Of course. He was a socialist, at least nominally. And he joined the South African Communist Party at one point.

But so what? Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were slaveowners, yet we recognize that they played key roles in the founding of America. Simply stated, people can do great things yet still be imperfect.

3. Race – Notwithstanding South Africa’s peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy, the nation faces some major race-related challenges. Simply stated, blacks are relatively poor and whites are relatively rich. And that’s what leads some politicians to pursue bad policy, such as class-warfare taxation and the aforementioned land confiscation.

To make matters even more complicated, there is also a significant – and very wealthy – Indian minority. Indeed, they are the ones who have benefited most from the end of apartheid, which has aroused some racial resentment.

Last but not least, there is also a significant mixed-race community that is culturally separate from native blacks (they speak Afrikaans, for instance).

4. Dependency – I wrote about this problem in 2014 and my visit has led me to conclude that I understated the problem. Simply stated, South Africa is not at the stage of development where it can afford a welfare state. Western nations didn’t travel down that path until the 1930s, after they already reached a certain level of development and could afford to hamstring their economies.

5. Labor law – Similarly, South Africa also has European-style labor protection laws, which discourage job creation. Such policies reduce employment in developed nations, but they cripple employment in developing nations.

By the way, if you want a great understanding of South Africa’s economic challenges, you should buy South Africa Can Work by Frans Rautenbach.

6. Corruption – In addition to the anti-market policies described above, South Africa also has a pervasive problem with political sleaze. Simply stated, politicians have been using government as a means of looting the public.

…city officials drove across the black township’s dirt roads in a pickup truck, summoning residents to the town hall. …the visiting political boss, Mosebenzi Joseph Zwane, sold them on his latest deal: a government-backed dairy farm… The dairy farm turned out to be a classic South African fraud, prosecutors say: Millions of dollars from state coffers, meant to uplift the poor, vanished in a web of bank accounts controlled by politically connected companies and individuals. …In the generation since apartheid ended in 1994, tens of billions of dollars in public funds — intended to develop the economy and improve the lives of black South Africans — have been siphoned off by leaders of the A.N.C. …Corruption has enriched A.N.C. leaders and their business allies… that is just a small measure of the corruption that has whittled away at virtually every institution in the country, including schools, public housing, the police, the power utility, South African Airways and state enterprises overseeing everything from rail service to the defense industry.

That last sentence is key, though the reporter never made the right connection. The reason there is so much corruption is precisely because the government has some degree of power over “every institution in the country.”

Here’s another excerpt, which is noteworthy since it overlooks the fact that the government created laws requiring black shareholders and directors. Needless to say, that system wound up enriching politically connected blacks rather than ordinary citizens.

A smattering of influential figures, like the current president, Mr. Ramaphosa, amassed extraordinary wealth. They were allowed to buy shares of white-owned companies on extremely generous terms and invited to sit on corporate boards. They acted as conduits between the governing party and the white-dominated business world. Some of the A.N.C. leaders who were left out of that bonanza quickly found a new road to wealth: lucrative government contracts. The public tap became a legitimate source of wealth for the well connected, but also a wellspring of corruption and political patronage, much as it had been for the white minority during apartheid.

7. Crime – The biggest quality-of-life problem in South Africa is crime. The homes of successful people are often mini-fortresses, with big spiked walls topped by electrified wires. Large aggressive dogs and private security patrols also are ubiquitous. Sadly, the government doesn’t do a good job of policing, yet it also makes it difficult to legally own firearms.

8. Education – To be blunt, government schools in South Africa generally are a disaster. Reminds me of the mess in India, except there isn’t a similar network of private schools to give parents better options.

Much of the problem is the result of schools being run for the benefit of unionized teachers (sound familiar?) rather than students. There is some movement in the Cape province to allow charter schools, so hopefully that reform effort will bear fruit.

9. Concluding thoughts – I’ll close with a couple of random non-policy observations. First, South Africa still has some quasi-independent tribal kingdoms. Not exactly the Swiss model of federalism, but it’s better than nothing. Second, it is possible to have multiple wives (I thought of Oscar Wilde’s famous saying when I heard that). Third, everybody should visit South Africa for the scenery and wildlife. I spent a day at Kruger National Park and it was breathtaking even though I barely scratched the surface (by the way, Frans also wrote a great book about the Park).

I periodically ask my left-leaning friends to identify a nation that became rich with statist policies.

They usually point to Sweden or Denmark, but I point out that Sweden and Denmark became rich in the 1800s and early 1900s, when government was very small.

At that point, they don’t really have any other response.

That’s because, as I pointed out in this clip from a recent debate at Pomona College in California, there is no example of a poor nation becoming rich with big-government policies (though we have tragic examples of rich nations becoming poor with statism).

So if statism isn’t the right approach to achieve prosperity, how can poor nations become rich nations.

I’ve offered my recipe for growth and prosperity, but let’s look at the wise words of Professor Deirdre McCloskey in the New York Times.

The Great Enrichment began in 17th-century Holland. By the 18th century, it had moved to England, Scotland and the American colonies, and now it has spread to much of the rest of the world. Economists and historians agree on its startling magnitude: By 2010, the average daily income in a wide range of countries, including Japan, the United States, Botswana and Brazil, had soared 1,000 to 3,000 percent over the levels of 1800. People moved from tents and mud huts to split-levels and city condominiums, from waterborne diseases to 80-year life spans, from ignorance to literacy. …50 years ago, four billion out of five billion people lived in…miserable conditions. In 1800, it was 95 percent of one billion.

What…caused this Great Enrichment? Not exploitation of the poor, …but a mere idea, which the philosopher and economist Adam Smith called “the liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.” In a word, it was liberalism, in the free-market European sense. Give masses of ordinary people equality before the law and equality of social dignity, and leave them alone, and it turns out that they become extraordinarily creative and energetic. …we eventually need capital and institutions to embody the ideas, such as a marble building with central heating and cooling to house the Supreme Court. But the intermediate and dependent causes like capital and institutions have not been the root cause. The root cause of enrichment was and is the liberal idea, spawning the university, the railway, the high-rise, the internet and, most important, our liberties.

In other words, the right ideas are the building blocks that enable the accumulation of capital and the development of institutions.

I periodically explain that labor and capital are the two factors of production and that our prosperity depends on how efficiently they are allocated.

But I probably don’t spend enough time highlighting how they are complementary, meaning that workers and capitalists both benefit when the two factors are combined. Simply stated, workers become more productive and earn more when investors buy machines and improve technology.

In other words, the Marxists and socialists are wrong when they argue that workers and capitalists are enemies. Heck, look around the world and compare the prosperity of workers in market-oriented nations with the deprivation of workers in statist economies.

This becomes painfully clear when you read this Wall Street Journalstory on the statist hellhole of Venezuela.

Irish packaging giant Smurfit Kappa recently joined other multinational companies abandoning Venezuela…President Nicolás Maduro’s socialist government. But this case comes with a twist. Hundreds of employees, who counted on the Irish company for transport, education, housing and food, continue to show up at work. They take turns protecting idled heavy machinery from looting that has become rampant as Venezuela plunges into hyperinflation and economic chaos. …“Help, we need a boss here. We’re desperate,” said Ramón Mendoza, a Smurfit forestry division worker for 17 years. “We’re so scared because we now know that all the government does is destroy everything, every business.” Their plight underscores the devastation that rural Venezuelan communities face as private companies pull out of a country that was once Latin America’s richest. The economy has shrunk by half over the past four years.

Wow, Mr. Mendoza hit the nail on the head when he explained that “all the government does in destroy everything.”

Maybe he can replace Obama as Libertarian Man of the year. Except he would get the award on merit rather than satire.

But let’s not digress. Here’s more bad news from the article.

Workers who live in the surrounding area had received interest-free loans from Smurfit for their houses. Residents said they no longer can count on the four ambulances that the company paid for to serve communities of tin-roofed shacks. At the Agricultural Technical School in the nearby town of Acarigua, which was entirely financed by Smurfit, nearly 200 children living in extreme poverty used to receive an education, lodging, as well as hot meals that have become a luxury as public schools collapse. Over two decades, many of its graduates had gone on to work for Smurfit. The academic year was supposed to start on Oct. 1. But with no money to feed and transport students, there’s silence in the halls… “It’s like poof,” Ms. Sequera said, snapping her fingers. “Our whole future was taken away.”

In recent days, the cash-strapped Maduro administration said it had come up with a solution for the Smurfit plant: That the workers would run it themselves. The government said it wouldn’t nationalize it but named a temporary board to help restart operations. The Labor Ministry offered no details over how it would replace Smurfit’s distribution network through which the company supplied its own subsidiaries abroad. But the workers say they can’t run the plant on their own and insist they want bosses—just not from the government. “We know how to move the lumber from here to the plants. What do we know about finances and marketing?” said Mr. Mendoza.

By the way, I’m not implying that employers are motivated by love for workers. Nor am I implying that workers are motivated to create profits for companies. The two sides are in a constant tug of war over how to slice the pie.

But the key thing to understand is that the pie grows when markets are allowed to function.

The United States uses the EB-5 visa to attract this type of immigrant, and many other nations have similar programs.

Needless to say, politicians from uncompetitive, high-tax nations don’t like this competition for entrepreneurial talent. And neither do politicians from poorly governed nations in the developing world.

They know they’ll suffer a “brain drain” if their most productive citizens can freely move to nations with better governance.

Needless to say, they should fix their bad policies if they’re worried about people leaving.

But instead they’ve decided to attack the countries that roll out the red carpet for newcomers. And they have convinced the statists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to create a blacklist of nations with attractive “citizenship by investment” and “residence by investment” programs.

Here’s the list of countries that the OECD is condemning.

The bureaucrats at the OECD receive tax-free salaries, so it’s especially galling that one of the conditions for being on this new blacklist is if a nation offers a “low personal income tax rate.”

You may think I’m joking, but that condition is explicitly stated on the OECD site.

And the U.K.-based Guardian says something similar in its report on the OECD’s latest effort to rig global rules so governments can grab more money.

A blacklist of 21 countries whose so-called “golden passport” schemes threaten international efforts to combat tax evasion has been published by…the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Paris-based body has raised the alarm about the fast-expanding $3bn (£2.3bn) citizenship by investment industry, which has turned nationality into a marketable commodity. …foreign nationals can become citizens of countries in which they have never lived. …concern is growing among political leaders, law enforcement and intelligence agencies that the schemes are open to abuse… After analysing residence and citizenship schemes operated by 100 countries, the OECD says it is naming those jurisdictions that attract investors by offering low personal tax rates on income from foreign financial assets, while also not requiring an individual to spend a significant amount of time in the country. …The OECD believes the ease with which the wealthiest individuals can obtain another nationality is undermining information sharing. If a UK national declares themselves as Cypriot, for example, information about their offshore bank accounts could be shared with Cyprus instead of Britain’s HM Revenue and Customs.

This blacklist is very similar to the OECD’s attack against so-called tax havens, which started about 20 years ago.

Politically aware people generally understand the policy differences between conservative and liberals (as they are currently defined, not classical liberals).

For those who don’t follow politics, there’s an accurate – and amusing – guide from Playboy that explains the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

And it includes libertarians and greens as well, which is a nice touch for those of us with unconventional views.

But what actually causes someone to pick an ideology?

In February, I shared a bunch of research that looked at how various personal characteristics are associated with – and may even cause – political differences.

This is interesting research. Though I suspect it irks many of us, regardless of our philosophical orientation, since it implies that our views aren’t necessarily the result of reason.

According to an article in Business Insider, this type of research even shows that differences extend beyond politics.

…what in the brains of conservative and liberal voters actually drive their belief systems? Scientists have been researching the psychological differences between people with different stances, and there are a few key ways that people on opposite ends of the political spectrum see the world. …Liberal and conservative tastes in music and art are different. …liberals enjoyed more cubist and abstract art. …conservative readers tended to say they’d rather visit Times Square than the Metropolitan Museum of Art. …conservative voters were found to be more likely to agree with statements like: “I often have tender, concerned feelings for my family members who are less fortunate than me.” But their responses suggested such feelings did not extend to people from other countries. Liberals, on the other hand, were more likely to feel that same level of compassion for people around the world, and even to non-human and imaginary subjects like animals and aliens. …A longitudinal study of more than 16,000 people in the UK found that… “Children who showed higher levels of conduct problems — that is, aggression, fighting, stealing from peers — were more likely to be economically left-leaning.”

What about libertarians?

In his Bloomberg column, Professor Tyler Cowen reveals that we are the most thoughtful group.

Libertarians measure as being the most analytical political group. That’s according to something called the cognitive reflection test, which is designed to measure whether an individual will override his or her immediate emotional responses and give a question further consideration. So if you aren’t a libertarian, maybe you ought to give that philosophy another look. It’s a relatively exclusive club, replete with people who are politically engaged, able to handle abstract arguments and capable of deeper reflection.

Trump voters and independents, by contrast, are less informed and more impulsive.

What else can we learn from this new study of political and analytical tendencies, conducted by Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand of Yale University? …one group that measured as especially nonanalytical was Democrats who crossed party lines and voted for Donald Trump. There is a stereotype of a less well-educated voter, perhaps both white and male, who reacts negatively and emotionally to Hillary Clinton… For all the dangers of stereotyping, the study’s data are consistent with that picture. …independents do poorly on the analytic dimension. …that group measures as relatively impulsive and prone to less informed judgments.

And here’s some research on “free-marketeers” from the U.K.-based Times.

Clever children will probably grow up to have free-market economic views, according to new academic research. The direct link between intelligence and economic conservatism holds true even if the self-interest that high earners have in a lower-tax, free-market economy is taken into account. The authors of the research, Gary Lewis and Timothy Bates, psychologists at Royal Holloway, University of London and Edinburgh University respectively, state: “Intelligence assessed in childhood [ages 10-11] was predictive of adult [30-33] economic conservatism.” …The authors studied data from the 1970 British Cohort Study and the National Child Development Study of 1958, both of which measured the intelligence of more than 17,000 children before they were distorted by educational differences. The authors also adjusted for sex, parental social class and childhood conduct problems.

I like these results, for the obvious reason.

But also notice that the authors adjusted the data based on the assumption that a “lower-tax, free-market economy” generates greater wealth. Interesting (and accurate) admission.

Now let’s consider the statist side of the spectrum.

According to some revised research that was reported by the New York Post, our friends on the left have authoritarian tendencies.

A political-science journal that published an oft-cited study claiming conservatives were more likely to show traits associated with “psychoticism” now says it got it wrong. Very wrong. The American Journal of Political Science published a correction this year saying that the 2012 paper has “an error” — and that liberal political beliefs, not conservative ones, are actually linked to psychoticism. …“The descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.” In the paper, psychoticism is associated with traits such as tough-mindedness, risk-taking, sensation-seeking, impulsivity and authoritarianism.

Since we’re on the topic of authoritarianism, let’s close by looking at some new research, reported by PsyPost, that doesn’t reflect well on the right or left.

New research provides evidence that left-wing authoritarian attitudes exist in the United States. The preliminary findings, published in the scientific journal Political Psychology, suggest liberals could be just as likely to be authoritarians as conservatives. …Conway and his colleagues developed a measure of left-wing authoritarianism, which was adapted from the right-wing authoritarianism scale developed by psychologist Bob Altemeyer. …The new LWA scale, on the other hand, asks questions such as: “It’s always better to trust the judgment of the proper authorities in science with respect to issues like global warming and evolution than to listen to the noisy rabble-rousers in our society who are trying to create doubts in people’s minds” and “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.” …The researchers found that left-wing authoritarianism was associated with liberal views, dogmatism, and prejudice.

I suspect the average supporter of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks that socialism is big government, with lots of handouts financed by class warfare taxation. Since that’s the common perception, is that the definition we should use?

The technical definition of socialism, though, is government ownership of the means of production, which entails central planning, price controls, and other forms of intervention. So, at the risk of being pedantic, is that how the term should be defined?

A few years ago, I tried to reconcile this definitional conflict by creating a diagram to show that there are several strains of socialism (or statism, leftism, progressivism, or whatever you want to call it).

I also created a 2×2 matrix to show how various nations should be characterized when measuring redistribution and intervention.

If you think I’m somehow being unfair, check out this recent column in the New York Times. Even an advocate for socialism has a hard time saying what it is.

Public support for socialism is growing. Self-identified socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are making inroads into the Democratic Party… Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the country, is skyrocketing, especially among young people. …what do we mean, in 2018, when we talk about “socialism”? …Socialism means different things to different people. For some, it conjures the Soviet Union and the gulag; for others, Scandinavia and guaranteed income. But neither is the true vision of socialism. What the socialist seeks is freedom. …when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, …from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.

Basically, we should all be “free” to live off of other people (though this cartoon sums up why that approach doesn’t work).

Though that’s just the start. Socialism eventually will mean…well, the proletariat will decide at some point.

There’s not much discussion, yet, of classic socialist tenets like worker control or collective ownership of the means of production. …today’s socialism is just getting started. …In magazines and on websites, in reading groups and party chapters, socialists are debating the next steps: state ownership of certain industries, worker councils and economic cooperatives… Mass action — sometimes illegal, always confrontational — will determine socialism’s final form. …As Marx and Engels understood…it is workers who get us there, who decide what and where “there” is. That, too, is a kind of freedom. Socialist freedom.

Observing the disaster that is Venezuela, many free-market proponents are inclined to say that socialism always fails. To bolster their claim, they can also point to the Soviet Union, to North Korea, or to Vietnam and China before those countries implemented free-market reforms. Those self-described communist systems generated vast poverty and famine… defenders of socialism have their own historical examples to cite. …Though one can quibble over the definition of the word “socialism,” there’s little question that the so-called social democracies of Denmark and Sweden offer some of the world’s highest living standards.

That being said, Smith is concerned that advocates of socialism don’t understand the risks of too much government. He cites a couple of examples, including the failure of price controls and also how India suffered from statism before starting reforms in 1991.

But his comments about the United Kingdom and the Thatcher reforms may be the most important, because the Brits actually tried real socialism (i.e., government ownership of the means of production).

…the U.K. provides a cautionary tale. After World War II, the U.K. nationalized industries like steel, coal, aviation, electricity, rail transport and some manufacturing. But the British economy lagged behind its continental European peers during the midcentury. Manufacturing and transportation especially stagnated. By the time Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, both France and Italy were richer in per capita terms… Thatcher unleashed a wave of privatizations, along with other free-market policies. Britain…growth accelerated, and by 1997 it had caught up and passed France and Italy.

Here’s a chart from his column showing how the U.K. fell behind when it was socialist but then regained the lead following pro-market reforms.

Professor Smith’s cautionary words are noteworthy since he (based on having read dozens of his columns) leans to the left.

And here’s another criticism of socialism, this time from an unabashed liberal (in the modern sense of the word, not classical liberalism). Bill Scher has a withering review of a new book by a group of socialists.

Felix Biederman, Matt Christman, Brendan James, Will Menaker and Virgil Texas—of the socialist, satirical podcast Chapo Trap House…make bank by selling you a candy-coated version of socialism, one that may offend real socialists even more than liberal gruel-peddlers like myself. …The indoctrination begins with a condemnation of America’s containment of Soviet communism. …“Who cares?” if the Soviets won the Cold War, they write. …After blaming American-led capitalism for the world’s ills, the authors take aim at their favorite target: liberals. …In their evisceration of liberals and establishment Democrats, we get the usual left-wing criticisms of the Barack Obama and Bill Clinton presidencies… The Chapo crew’s romp through the history of feckless liberalism doesn’t stop with Obama and Clinton. Jimmy Carter is slammed… Lyndon Johnson is excoriated… Not even Franklin Delano Roosevelt escapes.

By the way, I can’t resist interjecting to point out that socialists had good reasons to condemn Bill Clinton’s presidency. After all, economic freedom increased during his tenure.

Though I suppose they also should be free to criticize other Democratic administrations for the supposed sin of not moving to the left at a faster rate.

The conclusion of Scher’s review is brutal.

After slogging through 276 of the book’s 282 pages of bad history…, the authors finally get around to their grand plan. Spoiler alert! This is literally it, in its entirety:

“After setting everyone on equal footing (by seizing the billionaires’ money, socializing their wealth, and handing the keys of production over to workers), you’re looking at an economy that requires something like a three-hour workday, with machines taking care of most of the drudgery; and—as our public fund pays for things like health care, education, scientific research, and infrastructure—all this technology actually makes work quicker, easier, and more enjoyable.”

The notion that socialism is going to slough off all that annoying labor to our forthcoming legion of robot slaves may come as a surprise to many socialists. …The Chapo hosts’ aversion to hard work extends to this book. Why suffer the details of how this nonworkers’ paradise, free of paper pushing and ditch digging, is going to be realized, when you can take in more than $1 million a year by dressing up stale arguments and thin policy ideas with inside jokes? The infomercial socialists of Chapo have exploited the free market expertly, and at least saved themselves from the 9-to-5 prison.

Until reading this review, I confess that these clowns were unknown to me.

But I’m going to take a wild guess that (like Michael Moore) they don’t share their wealth with the masses.

Let’s close by now perusing a serious economic analysis of socialism. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute looks at Why Socialism Failed.

Socialism is the ultimate Big Lie. While it falsely promises prosperity, equality, and security, it delivers the exact opposite: poverty, misery, inequality, and tyranny. Equality is achieved under socialism only in the sense that everyone is equal in his or her misery. …Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with fundamental principles of human behavior. …it is a system that ignores incentives. …A centrally planned economy without market prices or profits, where most of the property is owned or controlled by the state, is a system without an effective incentive mechanism to direct economic activity. …The strength of market-based capitalism can be attributed to an incentive structure based upon the three Ps: (1) Prices determined by market forces, (2) a Profit-and-Loss system of accounting, and (3) Private Property Rights. The failure of socialism in countries like Venezuela can be traced directly to its neglect of these three incentive-enhancing features.

The only alternative to a market price is a government-imposed price that always transmits misleading information about relative scarcity. Inappropriate behavior results from a controlled price because false information is transmitted by an artificial, non-market price. …The situation in socialist Venezuela provides a current example of the chaos and inefficiencies that are guaranteed to result from government price controls. As could be easily predicted, the widespread price controls imposed by the socialist regime in Venezuela in recent years led to chronic shortages of basic goods like milk, flour, rice and toilet paper, and long lines of customers waiting for hours to buy groceries at stores that frequently have mostly empty shelves.

A profit system is an effective monitoring mechanism that continually evaluates the economic performance of every business enterprise. The firms that are the most efficient and most successful at serving consumers are rewarded with profits. … the profit system provides a strong disciplinary mechanism that continually redirects resources away from weak, failing, and inefficient firms toward those firms that are the most efficient and successful at serving consumers. …Under central planning, there is no profit-and-loss system of accounting to accurately measure the success or failure of various firms and producers. Without profits, there is no way to discipline firms that fail to serve the public interest and no way to reward firms that do. … Instead of continually reallocating resources towards greater efficiency, socialism falls into a vortex of inefficiency and failure.

And here are portions of what he wrote about socialism and property rights.

The failure of socialism around the world is a “tragedy of commons” on a global scale. …When assets are publicly owned, there are no incentives in place to encourage wise stewardship. While private property creates incentives for conservation and the responsible use of property, public property encourages irresponsibility and waste. …Public ownership encourages neglect and mismanagement. …Venezuela today is moving in the opposite direction. Under Hugo Chavez, the private property and assets of foreign-owned oil companies from the US, France, and Italy were nationalized and converted to state-owned, state-managed assets. The results were completely predictable: corruption, lack of investment, deteriorating capital assets, mismanagement and a sharp and ongoing decline.

His conclusion is especially powerful.

By their failure to foster, promote, and nurture the potential of their people through incentive-enhancing institutions, centrally planned, socialist economies deprive the human spirit of its full development. Socialism fails because it kills and destroys the human spirit… Programs like socialized medicine, free college, guaranteed jobs, free housing, and living wage laws will continue to entice us… But those programs, like all socialist programs, will fail in the long run…because they ignore the important role of incentives. …Socialism is being repackaged and recycled by today’s left-leaning politicians including Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and is being taken seriously by a new young and gullible generation, many who weren’t even alive when the historic events of the 1980s and 1990s occurred including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the lessons from history about the defects, deficiencies, and failures of socialism are very clear. As we’ve learned from countless examples throughout history, including now Venezuela, the main difference between capitalism and socialism is this: Capitalism works.

Amen.

The observation that capitalism works and socialism fails is the point of my two-question challenge for my left-leaning friends.

To be sure, my challenge applies to conventional leftists as well as all varieties of socialists.

The advocates of bigger government surely should be required to show at least one example of how their policies work in the real world. But they can’t.

I’ll close by sharing this wonderful video of Dan Hannan explaining why liberty is better than socialism.

If you enjoyed that video, you can also watch Hannan in action here and here.

Today, let’s look at some new research from the World Bank on how good policy plays a role in generating wealth from natural resources. The authors start by explaining the issue they want to investigate.

The literature on economic development often assumes that natural resource endowments are exogenous. …the resource economics literature has emphasized that the resource base is endogenous to investment in exploration and extraction. That literature has, however, overlooked the role that market orientation and institutions play in driving investments in the resource sector. Our aim is to bridge the gap between these two literatures and explore the effect of market orientation on the discovery of proven (known) natural resource wealth.

They cite the United States as an example of a country that benefited from the right policies.

The experience of the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth century provides a historical account of the role of market orientation in driving natural wealth. Although the United States at the time of independence was considered to be a country of “abundance of land but virtually no mining potential” (O’Toole, 1977), by 1913 it was the world’s dominant producer of virtually every major industrial mineral (David and Wright, 1997). Rather than being driven by a comparative advantage in geological endowments, this resource-based development of the United States was driven among other things by an open market orientation and an accommodating legal environment with the government claiming no ultimate title to mineral rents

And they note that there is additional anecdotal evidence that liberalization produces good results.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that increased market orientation was followed by increased discoveries across continents and types of natural resources (see Table 1). The increase in discoveries after countries open up to the global economy appears to be quite stark. In Peru, for example, discoveries more than quadrupled, in Chile they tripled, and in Mexico they doubled. In Ghana, discoveries only started to occur after the opening of the economy.

Here’s a table showing the dramatic increase in discoveries after selected nations shift to a pro-market approach.

The authors want to see if such results are either random or policy-driven.

So they put together a detailed model and gathered lots of data.

…we put forward a simple two-region model of endogenous reserves based on Pindyck (1978) where multinational corporations are faced with an implicit tax which proxies for how closed market orientation is, and seek the lowest cost location. The model explores the interplay between market orientation and other channels such as the increase in the marginal cost of discoveries and (demand driven) natural resource price shocks. …For our empirical analysis we build a unique and hitherto unexploited dataset of the universe of world-wide major natural resource discoveries since 1950, covering 128 countries, 33 types of natural resources and over 60 years.

Here’s an example of the data they utilized.

And here are the results.

I’m not surprised to learn that good policy (i.e., free markets) generate a substantial increase in economic activity.

…our empirical analysis shows that market orientation causes a statistically and economically significant increase in natural resource discoveries. Our point estimates indicate that going from a closed to an open market orientation increases discoveries by 80-140 percent. …In a thought experiment whereby economies in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa remained closed, they would have only achieved one quarter of the actual increase in discoveries they have experienced since the early 1990s.

The benefits are especially significant in developing nations, where market reforms appear to have produced a four-fold increase in the discovery of natural resources.

Here’s a look at the data for the entire study.

As you can see, there’s always an element of randomness and uncertainty in econometric research (“noise”), but the trend is readily apparent and the statistical tests provide a good amount of confidence about the strength of the relationship between more economic freedom and more economic activity.

Second, this is additional confirmation of my gut feeling that the World Bank is the best (least worst?) of the international bureaucracies. Yes, they waste money and are capable of producing bad research, but the organization’s culture seems to be focused on what changes are needed to help poor countries. And that often results in solid research (for other examples, see here, here, here, here, and here).

You can occasionally find good analysis from other international bureaucracies, such as the OECD and IMF, but it’s far more likely that those organizations will promote statist analysis because of a pro-government mindset.